Founded in 1962 in Oslo, Varner is one of Scandinavia’s leading retail textile companies. Varner acquired several apparel companies over the decades and now owns 10 different concepts: Bik Bok, Carlings, Cubus, Days Like This, Dressmann, Urban, Vivikes, Volt, Wow, Levi’s Stores Scandinavia and Nike Stores Scandinavia. Focused on producing affordable styles, Varner now have 12,000 employees, 1500 stores and over 220 suppliers that cover 500 factories in 16 different countries.
Very aware of their rapid growth and the addition of new concepts, Varner wanted to relieve the pressure on existing IT systems and keep up with future retail trends. They also needed to meet consumer demands across all concepts for high-quality and affordable products, at lightening speeds.
“We’ve had huge success in the last ten to fifteen years and the pressure was on for us to keep reinventing ourselves. We knew that in the next three to four years a lot more business would be moving to online retail,” explains Olav Fyldeng, Head of Business Applications at Varner. “With that, consumers are becoming increasingly demanding, they want affordable, quality products at lightening speeds. We knew we needed to bridge the digitalization gap between IT and the business when it came to product development or we wouldn’t be able to keep up in the race.”
Today, Varner uses Centric Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) across 10 of their concepts to streamline product development and adapt to faster retailing trends. Since implementing Centric PLM, Varner has been able to see a holistic view of all their products which is helping them to shorten lead times with suppliers through better preparation and make profit-making decisions about their product lines. Their first go-live was 30% under time and budget and all concepts have experience fast and enthusiastic user adoption.
Thrilled by the success of Centric PLM so far, Fyldeng explains that the business is already establishing future plans, “Our next step is to add in suppliers shortly. We are driving a total business implementation, not just an IT project and we’re already seeing the benefits of having all of our concepts on one coherent, collaborative system.”
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